Now it just needs the wide distribution it deserves
The adaptation of Rudolfo Anaya’s widely respected novel Bless Me, Ultima from director Carl Franklin (One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress) has already been enjoying widely positive reaction. Rotten Tomatoes has reported an awesome 97% positive audience reaction, with almost three-quarters of the reviews leaning towards the positive as well.
- Ken Turan of the L.A. Times called Bless Me “a deeply satisfying feat of storytelling, Bless Me, Ultima makes a difficult task look easy.”
- Claudia Puig of USA Today said, “Bless Me, Ultima has its earnest heart-and setting-in the right place.”
- Peter Ranier of the Christian Science Monitor allowed that Franklin “offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.”
- …while print and online critics across the country praised the direction and the performances of Miriam Colon (A “theater firebrand and big-screen presence who portrays Ultima with a minimum of fuss and a gorgeous supply of elder authority.”)
- Jean Kaplan of Kaplan vs. Kaplan may have said it best when she called Bless Me, Ultima “a magical compilation of family, life, death, religion and the meaning of it all.”
L-r: Miriam Colon, Luke Ganalon, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo
The box office numbers are promising if not phenomenal. Showing on only 263 screens–about one-tenth the number of a normal “wide release”–the film is generating around $1,800 a screen, and made around half a million dollars in its first weekend. These are promising number, especially considering the nearly complete absence of advertising or promotion–a testament to the power of word of mouth.
The real challenge–often the case with independent films like this–is the serious lack of wide distribution. 263 simply isn’t enough to get the audience attention it deserves; it is by far the smallest number of screens of the top 25 English-language films in general release; as an example, the Twilight-ish ‘teenage witch’ movie Beautiful Creatures actually did far worse on a per-screen basis than Ultima in only its second week, but it is showing in almost three thousand theaters, and enjoyed a multi-million dollar advertising commitment from Warner Bros.
We’ll see what the future holds.
